Your HR Department May Actually Care About You
It’s a sad truth that we humans have a tendency to pay more attention to negative occurrences than we do the positive ones. The psychological term for it is the negativity bias; we pay a great deal of attention to ‘bad’ things and thus, overinflate their importance, frequently much to the demise of our sanity. Of course, we’re not all the same. We don’t all respond more attentively to negative stimuli, but the bias is a common one and one that’s backed up by buckets of psychological research.
So, is this why folk hate HR?
Serious question.
Hopefully ‘hate’ is too strong of a word. I’ve been working in Human Resources for the past 6+ years and often hear or read about how little faith employees have in their HR peers, the perceived police officers of any organisation.
As a shameless member of the Peloton Mom Facebook group, a deeply fascinating community, I have a great deal of insight into the woes and advice shared by women across the world, although naturally the majority are based in America (I am not). Many of these qualm filled posts begin with the classic #NotPelotonRelated signpost, and go on to outline workplace dilemmas. Here, HR departments across the world take a real bashing.
A consistent sentiment seems to be along the lines of “You can’t trust HR. They don’t have your best interest at heart.”
But don’t worry, Peloton consumers are not my sole source. I’ve stumbled across similar comments on the Glassdoor pages of countless organisations, articles, LinkedIn posts, and through conversations with family and friends. Qualitative, but data nonetheless.
The anti-HR feeling is rife enough to make a People Person take a good look in the mirror. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a good egg with good intentions, as are many, if not all of the supportive, fair HR professionals whom I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside.
Maybe this will help…
Once upon a time when embarking on the first module of my CIPD HR qualification, I was taught all about David Ulrich’s Four HR Roles. Ulrich maintains that a HR department can only be highly effective if it’s comprised of each of the following types of HR people: The Strategic Partner, the Change Agent, the Administrative Expert and wait for it, the Employee Champion.
Logical categories, easily applied to most workforces. Of course, it’s down to the Head of HR to ensure that their team is well-balanced but the point is, Employee Champions do exist. That’s right, HR employees with their colleague’s best interests at heart, so much so that the very nature of their roles is to exist as an employee advocate.
Plus, that’s not to say that the three other types of HR roles are devoid of care for their colleagues. After all, the most basic but considerably common responses to “Why do you want to work in HR?” are often along the lines of “I enjoy working with people”, “I’m a people’s person” and “I want to help others.”
Novice responses that fail to account for the many aspects of the HR profession, but the good intentions are apparent.
Surely, it has to be the rarity rather than the norm that these genuine intentions lessen as time goes on.
We’re not pursuing HR to wreak havoc and hell. Honest.
We’re just the ones liable to relay suboptimal news in an organisation. After all, we’re trained on how to do lawfully. The redundancies, pay cuts, disciplinaries and the many many more harsh workplace realities, they’re no fun. For most of us HR folk, they’re unsurprisingly the least desirable of our responsibilities.
A challenge, yes. Enjoyable, absolutely not.
Nonetheless, it’s easy to empathise with the awful experiences encountered by employees in the workplace, particularly in the context of this mindboggling pandemic. There are many shocking accounts out there in which HR employees have indisputably acted unethically. Ergo, the actions of the few wrong’uns tarnish the reputation of the profession.
Tie this in with the negativity bias i.e. that we are far more likely to make our complaints than our positive thoughts known, and well, long live the defamation of HR departments.
Or perhaps I’ve fallen foul to the negative bias myself, guilty of naturally disregarding the positive, and ruminating on the less favourable comments.
Psychology is a wondrous thing. Either way, one thing rings true. Fancy pursuing a career in HR? Resilience is a must.
